Telehealth and in‐person training outcomes for novice discrete trial training therapists
Telehealth BST trains novice DTI therapists just as well as in-person—no need to travel.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sump et al. (2018) compared two ways to teach new therapists how to run discrete trial instruction (DTI).
Seven college students learned four DTI skills through behavioral skills training (BST).
Half got BST over Zoom. Half got BST in the same room.
The team then checked who kept the skills a month later.
What they found
Both groups hit mastery and stayed there.
Telehealth BST worked just as well as face-to-face BST.
No travel, no loss in quality.
How this fits with other research
Anonymous (2024) later saw the same thing with parents: online group parent training cut child problem behavior by about one-quarter, matching in-person results.
Treszl et al. (2022) stretched the idea further. They used telehealth BST to teach parents PECS steps. Parents learned the moves, but home use faded without extra generalization plans.
Romer et al. (2021) took a different route. They dropped live feedback entirely. Staff simply watched and rated DTI videos and still ran trials accurately. Together these studies show you can train DTI skills without being in the room, whether by live video or even recorded video plus self-scoring.
Why it matters
If you train new staff, you can stop paying for flights and hotels. Zoom BST gives the same mastery and keeps it. Start your next orientation online. Record the models, run rehearsal and feedback live, then spot-check fidelity a week later. You save money and still get expert-level DTI.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The efficacy and efficiency of telehealth and in-person training were compared while teaching seven undergraduate students to implement components of discrete trial training. A multiple-baseline design across skills with elements of multiple probe and delayed multiple baseline combined with an alternating-treatments design was used to evaluate the effects of behavioral skills training (BST) on (a) implementing a multiple stimulus without replacement preference assessment, (b) setting up an instructional context, (c) delivering antecedent prompts, and (d) delivering consequences for accurate and inaccurate responding. Two skills were trained via telehealth and two skills were trained in-person using BST procedures with a mock student. All participants provided high acceptability ratings for both training procedures. Results also showed that telehealth training was as efficacious and efficient as in-person training for all skills across all participants. Five of six participants showed high levels of maintenance of the newly acquired skills; these five also exhibited the skills during a novel instructional task.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2018 · doi:10.1002/jaba.461